Gun Culture 2.0: The Sociology of the Great Gun-Buying Spree of 2020

David Yamane is Professor of Sociology at Wake Forest University. For the first twenty years of his career, Prof. Yamane focused on the sociology of religion. Since 2011, he has researched the sociology of guns.

As Prof. Yamane once explained, “there is no sociology of U.S. gun culture.” Most gun-related studies are epidemiological or criminological, and few people really study why, in many parts of the country, guns are actually a normal part of everyday life. Prof. Yamane seeks to fill this research gap.

Part of the reason there is little sociological research on gun ownership is that in parts of the country with few gun owners, like in left-leaning university environments, gun ownership is particularly stigmatized. Prof. Yamane himself grew up in California and has spent his career in academia, so he was in for a surprise when he moved to North Carolina about ten years ago and found that gun ownership could be normal. It contradicted the narrative he had grown up with.

Prof. Yamane realized he was likely not alone in feeling this. He realized he was also probably not alone one day when he was nearly in physical danger, felt powerless, and went on to buy a gun so that he would never have to feel that way again. Indeed, Prof. Yamane has found that the main contemporary reason for gun ownership is much like his own reason for buying a gun: self-defense.

Defense-oriented gun ownership is a hallmark of Gun Culture 2.0, the current combination of gun-owning reasons and demographics. This is a split from the previous American gun culture, Gun Culture 1.0, which was in large part made up of older white males living in rural areas who wanted to hunt or otherwise use their guns recreationally. Gun Culture 2.0, in addition to being defense-oriented, attracts more young, female, urban, and minority gun owners than Gun Culture 1.0.

Last year, there was what he describes as the “Great Gun-Buying Spree of 2020”: all demographics were interested in buying firearms. Because of a variety of factors, including Covid and civil unrest, people didn’t know if a breakdown of civil society was to follow, and were ready to prepare for the worst. Unlike previous gun-buying sprees, which were motivated by the anticipation of restrictions on gun ownership, last year saw an increase in firearm purchases for the self-defense reasons encompassed by Gun Culture 2.0.

Prof. Yamane breaks up Americans’ views on gun ownership into three categories: ⅓ of the population that would never own a gun; ⅓ already own guns; and ⅓ that is “gun curious” – not opposed to gun ownership but doesn’t feel compelled to own one either. He encourages people who fall into these categories to respect each other’s positions and dearly-held beliefs and be open to understanding.

As someone who straddles the two sides of the gun-ownership debate himself as a liberal gun owner, Prof. Yamane sometimes finds himself with no willing listeners, since one side of the debate can be excessively pro-regulation while the other can be excessively pro-gun, when the answer is ultimately in the middle. Inspired by philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who wrote that “I have sedulously endeavored not to laugh at human actions, nor to lament them, nor to detest them, but to understand them,” he stresses the importance of thinking like a social scientist, which means bracketing one’s own beliefs and analyzing the situation empirically and neutrally before judging it.

David Yamane